by Ben Ormstad
“Th-there are so many it’s impossible to tell one from the other.” Ayamii’s already stressed expressions turned worse as he moved about trying to inspect them all.
“Guess we’ll just have to get ready for action, then,” Frida said, the sound of her Ripper machete being drawn and swishing through the air. “Nothing we haven’t already experienced. Right?”
“Right,” I said and clasped a hand on Ayamii’s back. “And with our upgraded gear, I think it’ll be as easy as munching a piece of sugary cupcake, eh?”
“I… I’m not sure. We need to huh-hurry.” He looked up at me, nervously pulling at the belt straps keeping the improvised clothing wrapped tight. “M-most of us aren’t used to fighting. We live secluded from the rest of the world, in peace with each other. Just surviving each day is diffi-ifficult enough.”
“All right, no time to waste,” I said and pointed at my comrades as I mentioned their names. “Ayamii leads the way. Hiko, you watch our backs. Since you’re the lowest leveled, I don’t wanna risk you getting snatched by a monster that suddenly bursts from the ground – or whatever. I’ll stay beside Ayamii, while you, Frida, scout ahead, since you’ve got Sneaking as a personal specialty.”
She placed her hand at her brow in a salute. “Ay, ay, cap’n.”
“But don’t go so far we’ll lose ya if Ayamii sends us another way.”
Rolling her eyes, she said: “Unnecessary information, Dex.”
I waved her off and addressed our purple friend: “Lead the way.”
The footprints continued throughout the rest of the dark hallway, until we reached a junction with three paths onward. The one to the left continued the dirty, narrow hallways, but to Ayamii’s despair whoever owned the footprints hadn’t chosen that way.
Straight ahead a ladder leading back up to the second floor also showed no signs of being recently used. Although, the ladder steps weren’t as grimy as everything else down here, so I pointed out it could be a possibility they’d climbed back up. My sense told me something else, but hey, Ayamii needed some positive input.
Ayamii directed us to the right, through a series of downward stairs. Soaked in darkness, we had to whip out some sources of light before moving on. I lit my flashlight, while Hiko fired up the torch. The white light from the flashlight, the orangey flickering from the torch, and the aqua blue glow from our FL-Armors all danced and mixed across the rugged brick walls as we trudged onward.
Descending deeper and deeper, our boots clacked against the dirty metal steps. With each consecutive flight of steps, the atmosphere grew more humid and the temperature increased. In the flickering torchlight, sweat glinted on Ayamii’s slick skin. And each time Frida returned after scouting ahead, she was sweatier than the last time. Interestingly, the temperature inside the FL-Armor had hardly changed at all, leaving both Hiko and I impervious to the heat our two companions suffered under. I found it curious how the suit so perfectly managed temperature while still letting odors through.
The prison-lab seemed bottomless, merely continuing forever toward an ever elusive – and possibly imagined – endpoint. I calculated how long we’d been descending, and it seemed likely we’d actually reached about the same level depth where I originally spawned.
Approaching a corner and what I suspected was yet another stairway, Frida returned from scouting. Panting, her chest heaved up and down, drawing my eyes to the bulging curves behind her armored chest piece. She leaned against the wall and combed fingers through her white hair plastered across her face and shoulders like a wet towel. “Bad news,” she breathed, still catching her breath. “There’s a... body. A few meters down. Not a… pretty sight.” Turning to Ayamii, she said: “I don’t know what the people from your community generally look like, but this one… I don’t know, but–”
Anger flashed in Ayamii’s changing expressions, then sadness, grief. Without answering or waiting for Frida to finish, he pushed past her and disappeared around the corner, leaving a scent of vanilla in his wake.
Following, we found him in front of a half-open, solid door. A smell of rotten eggs wafted from the crack.
Ayamii crouched over a badly battered humanoid in a pool of blood. Female, clothes ripped, unevenly matched eyes staring straight up at nothing. Body larger than him and with a skin tone akin to normal humans. Still something was ‘off’, revealing it was indeed one of the mishaps and not actually a regular human being. Ayamii held her hands in his, stroking her wounded arm.
I swallowed, went to him and placed an armored hand on his shaking shoulders. “Did you know her?”
“Ye-yes...”
“Man, I’m sorry,” I said, getting goosebumps at the sight of multitudes of footprints that had smeared the blood out like red paint.
Hiko came up beside us. The aqua blue light in his helmet visor glowed brighter than usual. “We will find the ones responsible, and we will make them pay.”
“Melanie… Sh-she is… was… a part of my group of rangers,” Ayamii said, his voice brittle. “Biweekly we take turns, either standing guard or going out to look for supplies or living mishaps. This week I was assigned th-this guard post, while she was told to find the Re-Assembler parts. But she thought the task was too difficult, so… I offered to g-go instead.” He withdrew his thin lips, baring the stumped, disfigured teeth, then said – fluently and with a deep, burning aggression I hadn’t heard before: “This was supposed to be me.”
“Don’t think like that,” Frida said as she scrutinized the bloodstained footsteps trailing from the body and out through the door. “No-one could know this would happen.”
Ayamii grunted something ineligible, removed a silver bracelet from the dead female and – after folding it in two – put it on his own wrist. Equipping both his knives, he silently continued. Opened the solid door and passed the threshold into yet another section of the prison-lab.
Quickly, I checked my status:
Character States
Poisoned : 01:49:22 until dead
In other words, we’d been walking for more than an hour. The time never ceased, never slowed. Neither did the poison. As I pondered whether I’d ever be set free from this by now extremely annoying curse, I joined Ayamii.
A ruthless stench greeted us on the other side. Meter-high piles of junk cluttered the concrete floor, each directly underneath large, circular holes in the ceiling towering above us. Self-illuminated, puke-green liquids formed by decomposing, biological materials seeped out from the piles and gathered in puddles where the floor sloped. A greenish mist oozed from the trash.
Frida moaned behind me. “Oh my god, it smells horrible. And the heat is overwhelming down here. What is this place?” Even if she spoke in a low volume, the large area easily carried her high-pitched voice.
“My bet,” I whispered and nodded up at the holes in the ceiling. “Failed genetic experiments and various junk get thrown down those and end up here.”
Cupping her mouth with a hand, she muttered: “Oof. You’re probably right. That makes it even worse.”
“No!” Ayamii cried, ran and stopped by the largest pile nearby. Crouched next to two bloody bodies.
Scanning the area for enemies in hiding, I saw Hiko rummaging through junk – taking care to inspect basically everything, it seemed. What did he hope to find in a place like this? I shook my head and zigzagged between green-oozing waste on my way to Ayamii.
The corpses partly overlapped each other. One blue-skinned female and smaller than him; the other pinkish, male and about equal size. Surely, I knew the answer, even so, I asked: “You knew them?”
Without looking at me, he said: “Th-they were like family.”
“More members of the ranger group?”
“Yes.”
Footprints riddled the drying pool of blood around them. The trails of bloody prints lead past the huge trash pile and to the far side of the area. Kneeling by Ayamii, I said: “Should we move them somewhere else?”
“No. This is a g-good place
for a mishap to let go of life.”
“Really – here?”
“Ye-yes, for most of us, this is like our birthplace,” he said, removed a gold ring from the female’s thumb, and a leather necklace with a pendant symbolizing a bird with its wings spread from the other. He put on the jewelry, before placing a hand on each of their heads and breathed deeply.
A loud slam echoed, like the sound of a crate smacking a wall, followed by Frida’s shouting voice: “Guards!”
I grabbed Ayamii and threw us both face-first onto the grimy ground as guns blasted and bullets cut through the surrounding air. Crawling on my elbows through the mud-like junk, I equipped my Rap-Attack and gestured at Hiko to make him follow my lead. As I reached the far left side of the trash pile, the first daemonorg guard came into view against a backdrop of the tiled wall. Handgun in hand, he ordered the others to advance on us. With my new, upgraded view through the FL-Armor helmet, an aqua blue, translucent box showcasing his type and level floated above his head:
Daemonorg Grunt
Level 2
Swiftly sneaking onward, I glimpsed three more. A flurry of glowing yellow eyes and horns that protruded from their cheekbones, foreheads and chins. One had a gun just like the commanding dude, while the other two wore ragged, beige tunics. Ripper machetes held high.
Daemonorg Grunt
Level 1
Almost like being psychic, I thought and smiled as I leveled my weapon and took aim. Pretty damn awesome, and it would only get better as I upgraded the bodysuit to Silver and eventually Gold.
“Breh-gliq! Zef rah-” the guard yelled when he noticed a reflective shimmer from my automatic rifle, but his sentence died when my stream of bullets tore through his flesh, discoloring the uniform.
Before I knew it, Ayamii was back on his feet – enraged with knives equipped. He screamed and bolted for the remaining enemies rounding the junk pile. After seeing him masterfully fight enemies earlier, I knew the scrawny humanoid could handle himself.
Hiko’s footsteps sounded from the back, so I waved for him to follow as I continued toward the guard I just ended. It would get us in position to attack the rest from behind. As we turned the pile’s corner, however, two grunts flanked us from a doorway on the left, hidden from view by a towering pile of trashed electronics and boxes.
They jumped Hiko and unbalanced him. His gun smacked against the ground as he struggled to fight them off. Every time their machetes hit him, an electrical blue light flashed around the cut, leaving a scar on the FL-Armor’s material. However, the blades didn’t immediately slice through it, which bought me some time. I swung the automatic rifle onto my back and equipped the Ripper machete instead.
“Mr. Walsh,” Hiko gurgled, his arms flailing trying to grab hold of something. The grunts’ combined weight overwhelmed him and all three tumbled to the dirty ground.
Using the momentum generated by running toward them, I bent my leg and kneed one of the grunts in the side with such force he was thrown off Hiko and rolled across the floor, smacking his demonic head against the wall. Before he could get back up, I sliced the fucker’s blade-wielding hand clean off. He screamed and kicked my thigh hard enough that I involuntarily rotated around to catch my balance.
-3 Armor
Next thing I saw was the one guard remaining who still had a gun. I thought he’d continued attacking Ayamii and Frida, but the ruckus must have alarmed him. Standing by the largest junk pile, he pointed the weapon directly at me. And the following split-second I felt two bullets gnaw into my chest as I my ears registered the double blam! from his gun.
-8 Armor
-3 HP
The FL-Armor numbed the sense of pain, instead causing me to step backward from the bullets’ force. I glanced down to see the extent of the damage, which, by any means, wasn’t particularly clever.
A hoarse roar drowned all other sounds when two arms coiled around my head and face from behind – one of which lacked a hand.
“Let go, you motherfuh–” I blurted, but was cut off by more bullets impacting my chest.
-9 Armor
-3 HP
Panic sparked when I realized the grunt trapping my head suddenly sunk his teeth into my neck like a fucking vampire.
-3 Armor
Through the munching sounds of him trying to chew through my armor, I heard the guard that had fired reload his gun. Rather than attempting to get away from the vampire-wannabe, I changed tactics and placed my arms tightly around his arms, which meant he couldn’t let go of me even if he wanted to.
Just as the guard finished reloading and readied himself to fire yet again, I flexed my thigh muscles and induced enough force to rotate my upper body. When the enemy’s gun spat bullets, I turned 180 degrees, creating a living shield out of the biting grunt. He screamed and fell to the floor – lifeless. Killed by his own.
Expecting more flying lead, I equipped the Light Handgun and jumped out of the way. Slammed into the wall – only to hear the guard echo his comrade’s scream. Turning, I saw Frida cut him down. Behind her the other grunts lay sprawling around Ayamii. His little, purple body shook from anger.
“It is over, Mr. Walsh,” Hiko said, helped me to my feet and handed me the machete I’d lost during the battle. “Thank you for unburdening me a little.”
I sheathed the blade and holstered the gun. Smiled. “No probs. Everyone all right?”
“Easy peasy, Ms. Cheesy,” Frida said, wiping the blood off of her machete.
“How ‘bout you, Ayamii?”
He came toward me, carrying the blood-dripping knives in hands that shook from anger. Without stuttering, he said through gritted teeth: “Loot the corpses and come. Time is short.”
37
Still smelling of rotten trash, we left the junkyard area and followed Ayamii. He said nothing, just stomped his feet while walking and gripped the knives tight.
The temperature kept increasing as we trudged onward through a series of windowless, dark rooms made entirely out of stone. I half expected to see dangling chains and piles of bones. Instead, small streams of water leaked from the ceiling and corners, trickling down the walls and dripping in puddles on the uneven tiled floors. Occasionally, we passed through mist created by the intense heat.
“I’m seriously melting,” Frida groaned. Her makeup dribbled down her face like multicolored liquid and mixed with the glistening sweat. “How do you guys survive inside those things?”
“For me it’s all good,” I said, shrugging. “Somehow the suit automatically regulates the internal temperature.”
“What? So you don’t feel the heat?”
“Well, every time I take a breath the hot air enters my nostrils, but the rest of my body is perfectly chilled,” I explained, then peered back at Hiko. “Ain’t that right?”
He gave us a thumbs up. “Yes, it is.”
“You lucky assholes.” Frida dragged a hand slowly across her damp face and sighed. “I’d do anything for a nice ice bath right about now. ”
“Each to their own. I’d rather burn to death in a pool of lava than jump in a tub of ice.”
“Really? I love it!”
“Yeah, but you’re Scandinavian,” I said, laughing.
“So?” she blurted out. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“Oh, I know all you viking-peeps just looove nose-diving in frozen lakes just for fun!”
She rolled her eyes. “You’re crazy. Almost no-one does that. But I do. Not for fun, though, but because it’s healthy.”
I wished she could’ve seen my shocked expression. “Healthy? Freezing my nuts off is supposed to be healthy? You Scandinavians are the crazy ones, that’s for sure.”
“‘Us Scandinavians’?” she said, waved her hands and wiggled her head like an offended, politically correct person of the female persuasion. “You think we’re all the same? Do you believe Norway is the capital of Sweden, and that polar bears walk the streets as well?”
“Jesus,” I said, laughi
ng. “Calm the calamity that is in your mammaries, girl.”
“Calm the what in my who?” Frida said, before her seriousness broke down and she laughed out loud.
“I blame the Urban Dictionary for that one!” We both chuckled for a few moments, which was a nice distraction from our gloomy surroundings. Catching my breath, I turned to Hiko. “By the way, why did you rummage through those piles of crap back there, man?”
“Why not?”
“Because… piles of crap?”
“Valuable items may be found in the damnedest places, Mr. Walsh.”
“Hah, true! So, any luck?”
“Unfortunately, no.”
I shrugged. “Well, no shocker there.”
“However, I found this on the guard I killed,” he said, producing a small device. “Do not know what it is.”
“Lemme see.” I matched his walking speed and stared at the thing resting in his palm. Resembling a smartphone, comprising a dark, reflective surface with no visible buttons. “A phone, maybe? Try swiping a finger across the screen.”
He did.
Nothing happened.
Hesitant to interrupt Ayamii’s boiling mood, I kind of just whispered his name to check if he was mentally available.
Without turning or replying, he slowed his pace somewhat.
“Hiko found a, uhm, device on one of the dead enemies,” I began.
The purple humanoid stopped, his tense shoulders relaxed a bit. “A d-device?”
“Yeah,” I said, happy to have his attention. “Kinda looks like a phone or something. Maybe you know how to turn it on and use it?”
Saying nothing, Ayamii joined us, sheathed his knives and grabbed the cell phone-looking thing. His changing expressions flipped through a series of aggressive micro-twitches.
